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"Australian prime ministers since Harold Holt have all fostered close relationships with the United States, but John Howard has initiated economic and military policies that have bound the two countries even tighter. As a result, many Australians now believe that not only our sovereignty but also our very identity as a nation is under threat, and that we are fast becoming America's 51st state." "In this meditation on Australian identity, Dennis Altman suggests that the tendency to attribute malign American influence to everything we dislike about the contemporary world is the flipside of seeing the US as the only model worthy of emulation, and serves to conceal the deeper questions we face - namely, how does Australia imagine its future?"--BOOK JACKET.